- Posts tagged Apple
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Magid's Wrong: Apple Should Shun 7-Inch iPad
I read a lot of what tech pundit Larry Magid has to say and most often I find myself nodding my head in agreement. Even when I think he's wrong, I usually have no trouble following his reasoning. But now that he's joined the ranks of experts who are clamoring for Apple to release a "tweener" 7-inch iPad, I've gotta take exception.
In a column on The Huffington Post today, Magid says, "It would be a smart move. Even though Apple is doing fine with its current form factor I suspect it could grow the market even further with a smaller, cheaper and lighter iPad." I think this product, which the late, great Steve Jobs ridiculed as a silly "tweener" idea, would cannibalize sales of the existing iPad line. People who want a tablet, don't want a wallet or a hand-sized flat-screen device. They want a tablet. Sure, a lot of the competition has entered the market at the smaller size but isn't it just possible that one reason they've been so largely unsuccessful is that their form factor sucks?
It's not like Apple can or needs to corner 100% of the tablet market. I think they're better off staying at the higher end just as they have with the iPhone and the Mac. Let the also-rans and the me-toos futz around in low-margin and marginally interesting products. Apple should stay the high ground.
Google's Brin a Bit Hypocritical
Google co-founder Sergey Brin, in an exclusive news interview, expressed serious concerns about the near-term fate of the open Internet. He focused his concerns primarily on:
- governments trying to censor content
- entertainment industry stubbornness in adapting to the Net
- Apple
He attacked Facebook and Apple for their proprietary, closed platforms, which he says gives them a throttle on consumer freedom and access. Of course, those are his two primary rivals, which leaves the value of his observations clouded in the mists of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt, for the uninitiated).
Beyond that point, however, the fact is that Google is as much a proprietary platform as Apple or Facebook, they just go about it in a different way. Where the two competitors on Google's radar largely shun open source while Google fairly embraces it, Google is no less inclined to lock its users in, using a very clever and useful interlinkage of data among its apps and interoperability of all their software and platform pieces to make it nigh impossible for folks (like me) who are heavy users of their technology to consider moving to other platforms.
I don't see any of this as evil or nefarious. It's good business all around and all of these players are up-front about what users are buying into. I'm a heavy user of Apple and Google, less so of Facebook (though increasingly there as client demand calls for it). But I never had any illusions about platform openness and competitive price-amelioration as part of my picture. I've opted for convenience over the potential moral dilemma of using closed-source or locked-in technology.
Hey, Apple! Give Me Back My "Save As..."!
Sometimes I look at a user interface decision someone's made and scratch my head, wondering what in the world they were thinking. On rare occasions, that "they" is Apple.
My case in point today is Apple's TextEdit, the free generic text processor Apple includes with every Macintosh they sell. It's a far-above-average text editor and processor with some pretty nifty features packed into its small, free space.
But with one of the recent upgrades -- I think it came with Lion but I'm not 100% sure -- Apple removed the "Save As…" file option. It used to be that I could save a copy of an existing text document by selecting "Save As…" from the File menu and giving the file a new name and optionally a new location.
Not any more. In the latest revs of TextEdit, the old "Save As…" option has been foolishly replaced by a "Save a Version" choice. Selecting this option saves the current document with its current name in the folder where the original is stored. But despite its tantalizing promise of version control, this option simply overwrites the older version. In other words, it's identical to "Save".
Meanwhile, if I really want to save a copy of the file under a different name, I can't use "Save As…" (not available) or "Save a Version" (overwrites the current copy). Rather I have to take the non-intuitive step of choosing "Duplicate" from the File menu. This creates an identical copy of the present document in a new window. At that point, TextEdit will allow you to "Save…" the new document but it's at the expense of extra mouse-clicks and/or keyboard presses. Not at all intuitive.
Apple? I want my "Save As…" back.
Five Ways Tim Cook is Already Putting His Mark on Apple
My favorite news magazine, The WEEK, has a good summary piece on some of the changes Steve Jobs' successor at Apple is already making to put his imprint on the company. Some good news here for Apple watchers. Tim Cook might be Steve in a white hat.
Second Lion Crash. Now I'm Concerned
I just had my second gray screen of death in less than a week after several years of never seeing one. Both of these crashes have been on my home machine, a Mac Mini.
I've also been experiencing display weirdness. My HP w2338h monitor -- which I love when it behaves -- has been "fuzzing out", going to all-static display. If I turn it off and back on, it is fine. Sometimes I've waited to see if it would self-correct. Once it did after only about 15 seconds or so. I'm wondering if the two observations are related.
Because I make heavy use of my system all day, I have a hard time isolating a possible cause of these kinds of issues. What am I supposed to do, spend an entire day running only one app? But then I don't always see these problems even when I'm running all my favorite apps. That's one of the problems with complexity, I guess; the more of it you have, the more chaos you create.
If you have seen similar issues, I'd appreciate hearing from you. Maybe together we can dope this out. Meanwhile, I'm just glad Apple has improved the OS enough that I didn't lose any unsaved data in either hard crash.
Gray Screen of Death But No Data Loss!
Tonight -- or rather early this morning -- I experienced the first Gray Screen of Death on a Macintosh I've seen in so long I can't remember the last one. It was sudden and inexplicable. First, my Bluetooth Logitech keyboard lost its connection to the system; this has happened a lot in recent months. Before I could even react, I got the dreaded gray washdown over my screen and the black-and-white, multilingual message telling me I had to restart.
When it happened, I had an open document in TextEdit I hadn't saved. It wasn't very long but it was made up of a bunch of ideas that had begun to gel about a new kind of social network. It was important stuff for me. I could certainly recreate it but would I lose some of the spontaneous stuff that makes such middle-of-the-night gotta-write-this-down idea generation scintillating the next day?
Oh, well. I powered off my Mac Mini, waited a few minutes, and restarted it.
Not only did the system restart cleanly, there was my unsaved TextEdit document exactly as I had left it when the bleedin' demise of my Lion system had happened. I nearly shouted with glee. If my wife hadn't been sleeping in the same room, I might have done so.
So this is just another good reason to keep using Mac for me. For all I know, Windows would be just as brilliant in helping me recover from a system failure but none of my personal experience suggests that would be the case.
Thanks, Apple.
My iPhone4 is Jealous
I think my iPhone4 is jealous of the new iPhone4Steve.
It's been working great ever since I got it. Now that it has a new big brother, it's throwing a tantrum. The Home button has become sluggish. Sometimes I have to hold it down for 2-3 seconds to get the phone to do what I tell it to do.
I've tried reasoning with it and putting it on time-out. I even left it home alone once or twice (though I think that may have punished me more than it). All to no avail.
Maybe if I upgrade to iOS5 and get Siri? Oh, right, that's not going to work because even though the Siri code is in iOS5, it won't run if it finds itself living on a machine that doesn't have a 4 and an S in its name. Seems kind of like a sales gimmick, eh?
Anyone got any advice?
Is Apple's Bluetooth Sucky?
In my home office I have a Mac Mini on which I'm using wireless mouse and keyboard. The keyboard is from Logitech and works like a charm 99% of the time. The mouse is an Apple Magic Mouse.
Apart from the fact that the mouse doesn't work very well for me because of the way I am used to handling a rodent, the darned thing is constantly getting disconnected from the computer. Several times a day I get the message that it's disconnected. I go through the usual Bluetooth re-synch process of holding down the mouse button for a few seconds at a time. Sometimes that works after a few repetitions; other times, I have to restart the system to get it back. I've found that sometimes turning off the mouse and then turning it back on again helps.
But I've run into this with other Apple Bluetooth devices and apps in the past. For example, my iPhone 4 sometimes struggles to pair with a speakerphone I have in my car. It can sometimes take 2-3 minutes for the two to get together. Similar problems, though not quite so severe, with an Apple wireless keyboard and my iPad.
Is this a characteristic of Apple? A couple of my techie friends tell me that Apple's implementation of Bluetooth has always been a little weak. I find sporadic discussions of the issue on the Net but nothing concerted.
Is anyone else having these kinds of issues? Any thoughts on remedies?
Apple is Now Like the U.S.: It Has a Jobs Problem
As you know by now, Apple co-founder and Main Wizard Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO of his company yesterday. I'm a little saddened but nobody is surprised. COO Tim Cook was, as widely expected, elevated to the CEO post.
I've read several dozen analyses of the situation. Useless speculation is one of my favorite pastimes, so I'll add my voice to the mix.
My predictions for Apple as a result of this semi-seismic shift:
- Near-term (next 12 months or so), little to no effect. Jobs remains as Chairman and will still be involved in design and product decisions. With him, "involved" means "dominating." Cook's been running day-to-day anyway. Apple has its hands full extending and fully exploiting the new product categories it's either defined or led.
- Mid-range (1-3 years), Apple's rep as THE primary innovator will fade a bit as other companies take the lead in new product categories and Apple scores an occasional win. This assumes two things: Steve doesn't fully retire or die (he's had surgery for pancreatic cancer and in general the prognosis for long-term survival is not good); and no major new product categories emerge from an unknown space.
- Long-term (3+ years), Apple will settle into place as a once-innovative, still-excellent company with a broad range of consumer products based around computation and multimedia, becoming, if you will, the Sony of America.
If Jobs' influence ends sooner than 3 years either by full retirement or illness or death, then all bets are off in the mid-range. What makes Steve unusual -- his co-founding partner Steve Wozniak has declared Jobs to be the greatest tech innovator and executive in history and I'm not sure that's an overstatement -- is his combination of vision, style, and execution ability. Ideas are a dime a dozen; the ability to sort out the good from the bad is more unusual. But to find someone who can do that and then execute a strategy to make the chosen idea successful is a true rarity.
Cook's management style has been characterized as gruff and assertive, two of Jobs' traits, but more disciplined and predictable. He promised in an email to the troops that Apple wouldn't change its DNA. But DNA evolves and it's not clear to anyone how well Cook will weather change when he has the helm.
I may have more thoughts in coming hours and days but for now, I see this as a fairly smoothly handled transition in a company that has tremendous momentum and is unlikely to be badly hurt even by significantly dumb decisions, of which I don't expect very many.
Apple Proves it Cares More About Profit Than Users...Again
Well, Amazon.com and BarnesAndNoble.com both caved in today to Apple's outrageous and ludicrous -- and quite probably illegal -- rules preventing sellers of iOS apps from offering their users the convenience of in-app purchase of books and magazine subscriptions. The high-handed budding monopolists in Cupertino demonstrated once again that their primary passion -- which was once user experience and convenience -- is now squeezing every drop of profit it can out of those whose content drive its platform's successes.
So now i as a heavy user of Amazon.com will no longer be able to search for and buy new books within the Kindle app from which the "Kindle Store" button has been removed in the update announced today. For now, at least, I'm simply declining the upgrade. It's inconvenient for me because now I can't do an "Upgrade All" when it and other apps have updates available, but for now it's my little way of protesting Apple's despotic behavior.
Someone is going to have to convince me this isn't monopolistic behavior. Apple seems to me to clearly be attempting to leverage its dominance of the smartphone/tablet software channel to force developers and vendors to cut it in on revenue they gain from products sold outside the apps they market through Apple. Classic bundling as far as I can tell.
I hope Amazon, like its Canadian counterpart Kobo, decides to write an HTML5-based app and circumvent the Apple App Store altogether. If they do that, I'll download the new app and delete the App Store version in a New York nanosecond. This heavy-handedness will provide app developers even greater incentive to escape the AppStore altogether, particularly when new avenues of distribution like Facebook and its new game platform are appearing with astonishing rapidity.
Heads up, Apple! Your short-sighted greed will cost you dearly if you don't wake up and smell the Web apps.
